Twenty years ago, Dover Street Market was born on a quiet street lined with galleries in London. Its founding mission was to challenge boundaries, embrace contradictions, and create a new kind of retail space that exists somewhere between store and exhibition, commerce and chaos. That vision has since expanded—Tokyo, New York, Singapore, Beijing, Los Angeles—and in 2023, on its twentieth anniversary, DSM finally arrived in Paris.
“It definitely wasn’t planned,” said Adrian Joffe, co-pilot of both Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market alongside his wife Rei Kawakubo. But somehow, Paris makes perfect sense.
Comme des Garçons has long considered Paris its creative home. Since the early 1980s, the city has hosted its shows and witnessed some of Kawakubo’s most iconic moments. In 1987, she invited Jean-Michel Basquiat to walk the CDG men’s show. A loyal customer and kindred spirit, Basquiat embodied the very spirit of DSM. As Charlie Porter describes in What Artists Wear, Basquiat’s style was “oversized, off-kilter, chaos in control”—a fitting description of DSM’s own signature disorder.
Despite occupying some of the most prized real estate in the world, DSM never looks or feels like a luxury store. The raw concrete floor, industrial installations, and untouched structural elements remain key to its spatial identity. In Paris, even the steel racks and display units were manufactured in Japan and shipped in to maintain visual consistency. The belief system, it seems, travels better than any brand ever could.
Rose Bakery inside DSMP, designed by Rei Kawakubo.
